Wednesday, 13 May 2009

Without the highest expectations, I looked for this again on slsk today, and there it was. Alas, only 128 kbps but I was so slaphappy to finally get my ears on this. Thanks to that nice Mexican fellow with whom I happened to enjoy a small morning chat before setting off to my class on "philosophy and music," ha!

"The Fall of the House of Usher is among the finest short-stories that Edgar Allan Poe has written. Till today, it fascinates readers with its fantastic atmosphere of the dread which springs from the human psyche. The story is centered around Roderick Usher, the last descendant of an old nobility, who lives together with his sister in an old, gloomy and reclusive mansion. The activities taking place in this house possess symbolic meaning and touch on some of Poe's preferred subjects such as the margin between life and death, human delusion, isolation and detachment from the world.

Debussy took notice of the story fairly early on, in the version as translated by Charles Baudelaire. The material fascinated him at once. Today we don't know for certain when he started working on translating the story into music. The idea must have been in his head as early as 1890 as some of his letters indicate. Initially, he seems to have had a symphony in mind, however. The actual work on the opera probably started in 1908 and continued to solicit his attention until the final years of his life. Similar to "Pelléas et Mélisande" he seems to have struggled for every single note. The opera, however, never reached completion, impeded both by Debussy's exhausting compositional work and his suffering from cancer intensifying throughout the years. About half of the opera - the complete first act and two scenes of the second act - had been finished, and some of it had also been noted down on sketch sheets."

Tuesday, 12 May 2009

Back in December, I had curtly spoken about "Labirynt", a shortfilm by Polish animator Jan Leniča which until then had only been available via youtube. Now I was approached by fellow blogger vespucci who was kind enough to upload a version of much higher quality, i. e. crisper image and larger aspect ratio. So here's the link he gave me (I hope it's alright to spread this).

"For 'L'Île re-sonante', Eliane Radigue conceived her inspiration from an image: An island in a lake, in the water of which her face is being reflected. This is both a "real" image and an optical illusion. The sounds refer to the depths - the water of the lake - und the heights - the island which rises above. The composer stresses the transparency from which this piece essentially sprung and at the same time, she provides another source of inspiration: that special moment in classical music when our ear ceases to hear the preceding notes but does not yet hear those notes to come. This transient fraction of a second which is located in a "not yet" becomes considerably prolonged here. But nothing - no explanation, no meaning - is forced upon the listener, on the contrary: Everything invites him to hearken the resonance of his own interior. [...]

A tone is born from silence and slowly swells from a deep bass while a little while later, the highs emerge and play their part in a whole range of oscillations. In a shimmering chime, this high tone starts to open, seemingly alive and curling, in swelling movements. The key to the secret of this electronic tone which is literally being made alive, is the gradual addition of further frequencies to the original note, slowly giving shape to that hint of sound - until suddenly, you get the impression of hearing some kind of lullaby, a human melody, far off in the distance, shifting from one sonar summit to another."

Monday, 4 May 2009

“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…”

Granted, quoting this much-addressed passage from Proust's In Search of Lost Time testifies a certain lameness on my part, and why is this extract which stems from one of the greatest achievements in literature (according to popular belief, as I haven't read the whole bloody thing) here anyway, in the vicinity of what is supposed to be a fervently propagandistic sort of summary of a dubious animated series from Japan?The madeleine issue, for one thing, is alluded to in the very last episode. And the concept which said madeleine issue itself alludes to - memory, in Proust's instance memories which are connected with, unearthed really from a person's mind by some sensuous experience with a certain object, such as the taste of a madeleine biscuit soaked with tea triggers a memory of his childhood - looms large in Serial Experiments Lain. Here, it is put in juxtaposition with questions of existence and identity,

"What isn't remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record. You just need to re-write that record." / "If you aren't remembered, then you never existed."

and subjects such as God, psychotropic drugs, our individual perception and definition of reality and certainly, communication in this age of highly advanced technology. Infact, a frequently used shot in pretty much every episode is that of high-tension wires producing a permanent whirring noise, signifying that "everyone is always connected."

Lain, the eponymous protagonist of the series, is an adolescent girl who lives with her clinical mother, technology-obsessed father and her typically irritable older sister in suburban Japan. Some schoolmates tell her that they've received e-mails from a girl who has just committed suicide, and when Lain herself sees the message in her computer at home, the apparently dead girl Chisa contacts her, saying that she has "just abandoned her flesh" and has found God in the Wired, a global communications network similar to but slightly more extreme than the internet.

Visually, although a little dated by today's standard and not exactly as impressive as Mononoke, the style of Lain is still incredibly striking and atmospheric, alternating between landscapes bleak and gloomy, psychedelically colourful, and luminously bright. The omnipresence of the Wired is symbolized by red moving patterns in the shadows of buildings, and at times the creators make use of Godard-influenced onscreen typography (see his Week-end as an exemplary display of this technique). The "bruitage" of Lain fluctuates between simulations of sounds of machines and urban infrastructure on the one hand and pieces of both harsh and melancholic electronica on the other which emphasize the solitude and confusion of Lain herself. The opening theme ("Duvet" by British band Bôa) seems antithetical but effectively adds to the whole and gently resonates Lain's state of mind.

Hopefully I managed to ignite some interest in some of you despite my lack of reviewing abilities and didn't just make this sound like a shitload of Cyberpunk mindfuck. It's 13 episodes à 20 minutes, and as such tremendously dense and at times a little frustrating to follow, but it's still a rewarding experience.